Arena
by Sidley Park Hermit
Summary: An alternate post-Takiawase story originally posted in March 2014. Beverly doesn't miss, but that doesn't mean this is going to be easy.


She held her flashlight beam on the body that lay halfway across the basement, watched blood pooling on the floor. He didn't have the look of someone who was going to get up again, tonight or ever.

Beverly waited. She'd seen this movie before.

Her ears were still ringing from the gunshots and probably would be for a while. Her hand hurt. Directly behind her, on the other side of what had looked like a huge glass wall with iron bars in front of it, was a grim scene that she'd only gotten a quick look at before Lecter appeared. Was there one body in there or two? The fuck was that on the back wall? Where was the entrance?

It was clear he wasn't conscious; she was 95% sure he also wasn't breathing. There was a grill on the floor that some of his blood was now dripping into. There were actually a few of those grills on the floor, she saw now. They matched the other paraphernalia of the slaughterhouse he'd been keeping down here. And yet, his was the only blood she could see. The floor - every surface, at least on this side of that glass-and-iron barrier - was meticulously clean except for the aftermath of the last two minutes. It must have taken an incredible amount of work to keep it that way over the years.

She held her light steady. She waited.

Something smacked hard into the glass directly behind her.

She jumped and heard herself make a short, sharp noise, nothing voluntary about it. Lecter still didn't move, but to look behind her she would have to move her flashlight beam all the way away from him. Fuck, fuck.

The closest wall was to her left; she moved slowly to get her back to it, to have an angle where she could at least have a peripheral view of everything - well, everything she knew of - and, keeping her gun trained on Lecter (Lecter's _body._ ) ( _Lecter_. He'd be dead when the M.E. called it, not before), she finally swept the light away from him for a second.

The woman sitting on the floor on the other side of the glass was the figure that Beverly'd mistaken for a corpse when she'd caught a glimpse of her lying prone by the far wall. There was no shortage of blood on the sweatshirt and sweatpants she wore - there was also blood on her hand, visible where she'd smacked the glass to get Beverly's attention, and streaking down the glass to where her palm was still pressed now, propping her up. Maybe not all the blood was hers.

Beverly swung the flashlight back over to the center of the room - it had only been a couple seconds - and everything looked the same, aside from the continued flow of blood seeping down into the drains on the floor. It looked almost black.

She looked back to the...cell? Observation room? The woman's expression was unreadable, nothing in her eyes that Beverly could recognize as the combined relief and terror she would expect from a captive about to be rescued.

The woman had just the one arm. Beverly realized dully that she wasn't even surprised by that.

"Can you hear me in there?" she asked, and the woman (Miriam) made kind of a face and shook her head. Her mouth moved, saying "not really," but her voice was almost inaudible.

"How do I get in?"

Miriam shook her head again, her lips readable: "I don't know."

Beverly swept the light back around the basement again. No news. She checked out the barrier separating her from Miram more closely.

"Can you move back?" she said, gesturing to show what she was going to do. Miriam scooted to the far left wall. From here Beverly couldn't tell if her legs were injured or disabled in some way, or if she was otherwise impaired from standing. Once the other woman was well out of the way, Beverly put her faith in the evidence of her senses and finally took her gun off Dr. Lecter. It was hard to get a good angle between the bars, which were closely set, but she got enough force behind it to smash the butt of her pistol through the glass, and with a little more work she had most of the nearest pane (there were three panes, each one floor-to-ceiling) cleared away.

"My name is Beverly Katz, I'm an FBI agent. Can you do something for me?"

Her voice was cautious. "Do what?"

"I want you to take my flashlight and keep it trained out on this room. Unless you know how to get the lights on in here."

"All the switches are on the other side of him." Beverly wouldn't forget the way Miriam said "him" as long as she lived. "I can take the flashlight."

Beverly got her arm through the bars and held the light out, and Miriam got up carefully and walked over to get it, having to pick around a few pieces of broken glass to get close enough. She used her hand to steady herself on the other glass pane, took it away for long enough to get the flashlight from Beverly's hand, stepped back, sat back down carefully on the floor.

As soon as she let go of the light and had a free hand, Beverly got her fucking phone out at last. She hit the flashlight, the camera, and 911 in about a second and a half.

"This is Agent Katz with the FBI, my badge number is JTT551701." Belatedly, it pinged that she actually had next to no information about what Miriam was going to need, but the answer to that probably wasn't going to be simple anyway. "I need two ambulances at 782 Yonge Boulevard, I have one suspect with gunshot wounds who...may be deceased, I'm not able to safely approach the suspect, and he was holding a hostage here who also needs medical attention."

She was on the line with the 911 dispatcher for a bit, and then with Baltimore PD, and while she talked she kept the flashlight beam from her phone aimed into Miriam's...living quarters, being careful not to shine it at her eyes. Miriam sat very still, holding up Beverly's flashlight and following its beam with her eyes, only occasionally glancing at Beverly and then back.

When Beverly was off the phone with Baltimore PD, there was a moment's silence, then the woman hunched on the bare concrete floor on the other side of the glass said, "Shouldn't you be calling Jack?"

"Yeah, I should," Beverly said. She swept her phone around, recording video of the area around them. It made her feel like there was a boundary between her and this room. She'd seen much messier, much bloodier scenes in her career, but that knowledge actually only made it worse. "I'm not supposed to be here," she added eventually.

"I'm not sure you are here," Miriam answered. "That it's not somehow one of his..." She looked at Beverly. "It wouldn't be the first time I've been tricked into thinking I was going to escape."

Beverly's phone buzzed in her hand and she answered it on speaker.

"Jack," she said.

"Beverly," he said. "Zeller has just told me that earlier this evening you said quote 'some weird shit about Hannibal Lecter' and left the lab early, and that he saw fit to inform me of this because the police dispatcher has two ambulances and a small army of squad cars headed to Hannibal Lecter's _house right now_. Would you like to clue me in?"

"Yeah," she said, and she did.

A team of paramedics took Lecter to surgery, because the motherfucker actually was _still not dead_ , and another team of paramedics helped Miriam Lass walk out after the fire department got through the barrier to her room. The other shape Beverly had originally wondered about was not a human body, but a large dead dog covered in a blanket. The rest of the cell was-

This was not Beverly's crime scene. She didn't have to look at it anymore. She walked up out of the basement and out the door into the flashing lights of the cop cars. The police officer who ought to be by her side had kind of lost his shit at some point in the basement, and she was momentarily alone. She breathed in, feeling like it was the first full breath she'd taken since walking into the house earlier that night.

Right then Brian Zeller showed up beside her, saying, "Jesus, Beverly, what the fuck?"

"It's good to see you alive too, Zeller," she said, with about a thousand times more cool than she actually felt. It _was_ good to see him. It was good to see anyone. She'd probably have hugged Freddie Lounds if that had been the first familiar face to meet her outside that house.

"You dumb fuck," Zeller said, taking her by the shoulders and then hugging her, in this way that gave her the impression that if they were both guys he would have been throwing a punch instead. "What the hell were you thinking?"

"I'm okay, Zeller." It was pretty easy to translate what he was saying. She pulled back and put a hand on his shoulder. "I'm okay."

He let out a hard, percussive sigh, rubbing his forehead. "Yeah. Of course you are, you're indegoddamnstructible. You just - walk in." He gestured at the house. "Jeez, I get it, you're in love with Will Graham, you could still take some fuckin' backup."

"...You're on a whole thing over there," Beverly said. "I'm not following."

"It's obvious. You're not on drugs, so that eliminates the only other explanation for you charging into something like this; I really should have known, well, I kind of did know but I was trying not to think about it because until twenty minutes ago I also thought he was a serial killer."

"I feel like this is not an appropriate conversation to have right now."

"Right. Sorry. Anyway, he's not a serial killer, so that's great. For certain values of 'great' considering what else that indicates." Beverly wondered how long he would just keep talking if she didn't say anything. Definitely wouldn't have the time to beat his previous record - not that she'd actually timed him since the earlyish days of their friendship. "Have you talked to him yet?"

"I haven't had a lot of downtime tonight," she said. She was _pretty_ sure she wasn't in love with Will Graham. There was already someone on that detail, doing stuff like taking care of his six dogs, and maybe his home, while he was in a psychiatric institution. But at the same time, it wasn't really possible for her mind to make full contact with concepts like "in love" - or "dogs" or "home" for that matter - right now.

"Beverly!" If it weren't Jimmy coming up to meet her, she'd be getting tired of the sound of her own name right about now. "Look, I want you to know something."

She cocked her head to the side, a little apprehensive; she already had already one coworker out here trying to unload some kind of issues on her. "What's that?"

"You're going to be in a lot of trouble," Jimmy said, "and if they try to push you out over this - well, I won't stand for it. I'll resign before I'll watch that happen. I'm going to tell Jack the same thing."

"-Yeah, what he said," Zeller jumped in, at the same time as Beverly said, "Listen, I don't want you to do that for me."

"I'm serious, kid."

She shook her head. "I broke a lot of rules tonight. Well. Laws. I broke several laws. I knew there could be serious consequences."

"He had someone alive in there," Jimmy said.

Beverly nodded. "He had someone alive in there. And her life, and stopping him, stopping all of this, is more important than my career. It's more important than - I mean, I could go to jail. I know that."

"Beverly, he had somebody _alive_ in there. And I have no idea how you knew that or why you didn't think you could tell us, but-"

"I didn't know," Beverly said. They both kind of stared at her. "I think I... part of me knew, but not consciously. Somewhere I had worked it out. That all the answers were, were in that arm." She felt cold talking about that arm again. "But I couldn't have told you that if you'd asked me on my way into the house. I just... I knew if I didn't walk into that place right then, when I had the opportunity, I was going to regret it for the rest of my life. However long that might be."

"Well." Zeller put his hands in his pockets. "Right now the only people who know that you didn't know that are me and Jimmy, so between now and when you have to explain this to a disciplinary hearing maybe you can come up with a less incriminating memory of your thought process."

"I like how you just casually volunteer both of us to perjure ourselves," Jimmy said.

"They can't ask us to say what we heard her say about when she knew what she knew," Brian said. "Well, they can, but they can't use what we say she said as evidence of what she knew, that's hearsay."

"Hearsay is a criminal justice standard, the Bureau's disciplinary process can use a much broader-"

"You're the one who brought up perjuring yourself, which is only applicable if-"

Over Jimmy's shoulder, across the street, Jack pulled up and got out of his car. They both followed her gaze and kind of shuffled incrementally away from and then back toward each other in what she recognized as an attempt to figure out how best to close ranks with her. "It's okay," she said to them both, patted Jimmy on the arm, and went to meet Jack.

"What did I say that sounded like 'illegally break and enter a murder suspect's house in the middle of the night with no backup'? Really, I've been missing out on a lot of sleep lately, did I at some point suggest that you do that and it slipped my mind?"

"Could have been in one of the conversations we never had," Beverly said. This was not how she wanted this to go, but it already felt out of her control. Jack probably felt the same way. He looked like death warmed over and his eyes were red.

"Katz," he said, his tone a warning.

"How often do you have those conversations that you never had? Jack, how many people are you going to keep sending out," she said, and he interrupted with thunder in his voice.

"Is that the answer you're going to give me, that I _sent you_ to do _this_?"

"How many people, into unknown territory, with your knowledge, with your approval, and knowing what we _don't_ have is your support?"

She had never been this insubordinate. Never _seen_ anyone talk to Jack like she was talking to him now.

It was a night of firsts.

Jack stared at her and inhaled as if to say something; he did it a couple more times before he spoke, and when he did his anger was overwhelmed with fatigue. "You think you can beat me up about Miriam Lass more than I've beaten myself up? You can't come close."

"No. I don't want to beat anybody up." She hadn't known this was where she was going until she got here, but, well. "I don't think I can do this job anymore."

Jack shook his head slightly. "...You're tired. We're all tired."

"I'm more than tired."

Jack shook his head again, though it didn't really seem like he was doing it to say something to her. It occurred to her that she didn't even know what had happened at the hospital. If Jack was here, and not at his wife's bedside-

"Did Phyllis pull through?" she asked.

"For now," he said.

"Agent Katz? I'm sorry to interrupt. Agent Crawford, hi." A tall, thin black guy in a rumpled trench coat had appeared at her side. She recognized him, after a second, as the BPD's lead detective on the Ripper killings that fell in his jurisdiction. "Agent Katz, we met before-"

"Detective Fisher. Hi." She shook his hand.

"I'm having a very strange night. I gather you've had a stranger one."

"Let me just stop for a second and check in with my other colleagues before we go to the station," she said, and he waved a hand and said, "Take all the time you need, Agent."

So she took Zeller and Price aside and said, quietly and firmly, "Tell the truth." Zeller opened his big mouth, and she said, "tell the truth," and he closed his big mouth, and she gave each of them a squeeze on the arm and went down to the station to give a statement.

Lecter, for all his strut, chose in the end to take a plea bargain and accept a life sentence without the possibility of parole. It spared his victims' families and his surviving victims the trauma of a trial, but it turned out that he was willing to give up that opportunity in order to escape the death penalty.

The night Beverly put two bullets in Lecter had been the second time she'd shot down a suspect; also the second time she'd ever had to draw and aim her weapon on the job, both of them in the small window of time that she'd known Will Graham. After the shooting, after the post-incident reviews, after FBI HQ and the DOJ investigated her, after everyone decided they didn't actually care what she'd done to put herself in that basement or why and they cleared her to return to active duty, after Lecter's sentencing that she didn't go to and the thousand interview requests that she turned down, she decided she should let Will be the first to know that she was done.

"Now?" Will said. "You could write your own ticket anywhere in the FBI. You caught the Chesapeake Ripper." They were sitting on the porch of his little house in Wolf Trap, on a clear and mild fall day.

" _You_ caught the Chesapeake Ripper," Beverly corrected.

Will looked out into the middle distance. "Mm. And all I had to do was let him kill me."

She leaned her shoulder gently against his, rubbed one of the dogs' neck with her opposite hand.

"What'll you do, then?" he said, looking back at her.

"There's a traditional custom among my people of retiring in Florida," she said. "...It's also a good place to become a marine biologist."

"I can't stand Florida," Will said. "Could never think in that kind of heat." He had kind of a confessional tone. It made her smile, though she wasn't sure why. "Not that I won't come and visit you," he added. "Just don't expect me there anytime between, say, Valentine's Day and Halloween."

"I'll put that down in my calendar," she said. "An eight-and-a-half-month-long annual event: 'No Will'." He smiled back, a little.

She wanted to ask him: _Isn't it hard living here? How can you come back to life in a haunted house?_ She wanted to ask him to leave with her, even though she knew the answer was no, just so that she'd have asked.

He put his hand on hers and she held it, lacing their fingers together. The wind rose and fell, and they watched the sky turn colors as the sun went down.

* * *

 _When I tell the truth, it is not for the sake of convincing those who do not know it, but for the sake of defending those that do._

\- William Blake


End file.
